Saturday, June 19, 2010

Briefly Famous

in a small way...Last week, an article about this blog appeared in Toowoomba’s local newspaper, The Chronicle.I enjoyed the process of getting it there.I was emailed by a reporter called Megan Masters, who had stumbled across this site, and asked me if I’d help her with an article about it. We agreed to meet at Peacehaven Botanic Park at Highfields, because I thought any readers of the Chronicle who were not already aware of this new botanic garden would be interested to know about it. I find it exciting that Toowoomba, after years of having a very nice park which is labelled “Botanic Gardens”, but is nothing of the sort. (A real botanic garden is a place where plants are being trialled and studied, and the public can learn more about them). That Peacehaven features a good range of local native plants, many of them never seen growing in any garden in this district before, makes it a garden worth knowing about.We met out there on the Queen’s Birthday holiday, a cold blustery day. Megan turned out to be a very likeable girl , able to maintain a good conversation about the plants even though the topic of local natives was obviously new to her.The newspaper-making process must be a difficult one. Such a lot of pages to be filled every day! Such pressure to produce quantities of relevant and interesting reading matter in a short time! So many people in the chain between the interviewee and the finished product delivered to our doorsteps. It’s not surprising that detail and accuracy are sometimes a little sketchy.Fortunately, perhaps, I have enough life experience to know that newspaper articles are often surprising to the people who are their subjects, so was not fazed by its few peculiarities.Megan went to a lot of trouble, for instance, to take a photo which would show that it was taken in a botanic garden, posing me with my hand on one of the labels which tell visitors to Peacehaven what plant they are looking at. No doubt this point waslost on whichever person simply cut off the bottom of the photo.

The plant was the Glossy Acronychia Achronychia laevis - See March 2008 for a description and pictures of its very pretty fruits.

I suspect that their wording may suffer similar indignities.The article also stated that I had “penned a book on the 30 or so local native varieties”. There should be an extra zero on that figure, but I was puzzled by it, as I don’t think we discussed the subject at all.My book, by the way, is available at Dymocks Bookstore in Margaret Street, Toowoomba, and sells for $30.00 or so. (Perhaps that’s where the “30" figure came from?)

A site about plants indigenous to the basalt soils of inland south-east Queensland, and suitable for use in gardens. The area it covers is roughly bounded by the Great Dividing Range, the Condamine River, the New South Wales border and the Bunya Mountains.TO SEARCH THIS SITENote the little white search box on the top left hand side of the site. Type your search item there and press ENTER

Author’s Note:This blogsite is a follow-up to my book, "Toowoomba Plants. Vol 1: Trees and Shrubs", published in September 2005 and now out of print. Look for a revised edition of it in 2016.“Vol 2" is in the pipeline. It will be about other local native plants (i.e. not the trees and shrubs).Meanwhile I want to use this medium to:• make further information about our local plants available to interested people.• report on local news, and discuss local issues about local plants.

Comments PleaseIf you've found an article interesting, please do comment. I will value your feedback, questions, corrections and further information - and I'm sure that other readers would appreciate hearing more points of view than those which come from me. NOTE: Your comments to not appear on the site until I've had time to approve them for publication, so don't worry if what you wrote seems to have disappeared into limbo. It will get there. I try to respond wherever a response is called for, so do check back later.

Contact Me:Please email me if you have suggestions for other articles for the blogsite, or if you wish to be notified when my new books are available.Patricia GardnerEmail: toowoombaANTI SPAMplants@gmail.com(obviously you should remove the anti spam letters before use)